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Comment by unityByFreedom | Hacker News Reader

HN: "delete Facebook"

Also HN: "show your face to this random site so an algorithm can tell you if you're hot or not"

I mean, it's an EU-funded academic site designed to raise awareness of privacy issues, so I'm inclined to believe them when they say they aren't keeping any of this data.

Maybe it's because programmers tend to think categorically, but I find HN frequently has this problem where people are freaking out like "why is it okay when Mozilla does X but you don't want Google to do X?!" as though we're supposed to treat every question as some sort of sui generis scenario divorced from all history and context.

History matters, context matters. I (generally) trust academics and democratically-elected governments, and I (generally) distrust giant ad-tech companies and authoritarian states.

Context mattering has nothing to do with sharing your face with a random site that claims to be supported by "The EU".

This is a site made by one guy, not the EU.

Creator here.

The project was created as part of my role as artist within the Sherpa consortium. It's a Horizon2020 research project whose goal is to figure out what Europeans believe are the biggest issues around AI that we'll experience in 2025. Most of the other partners are universities, and I'm the lucky one who gets to translate what we learn into art pieces.

Learn more about Sherpa here: https://www.project-sherpa.eu/

All the other works I've created / am creating for Sherpa can be found here: https://www.sherpapieces.eu/

Besides working as an artist I also work as a privacy designer, which means I specialise in creating things/products that protect privacy.

This website was a very cool challenge to build, a testament to the power of javascript.

I followed a link to socialcooling.com as well the other day. The things you are talking about are critical for a decent civilisation moving forward. Thank you for talking about them and making us think.

This is really cool work! If somebody else wanted to get involved in working on projects like these, how would you suggest getting started?

That's difficult to say. You could start with getting to to know an issue and specialising in it. Reading books from academic writers (not the stuff sold at airport bookstores). Read Slashdot. Once you've got a grasp, think about how you could translate what you learnt so that your mom would understand it. Think about what your mom likes: quizes, human-interest stories. Lighthearted stuff. Then create your own translation.

It's probably easiest to connect with a local group of people who care about these issues.

Where do the algorithms come from?

The main one is FaceApiJS.

One I trained myself (BMI), and the others I just scavenged from existing Github projects. So with most of these I don't know how they were trained, what photos they were fed, etc.

How accurate is the BMI estimator? I trained one years ago, but the performance wasn't great.

Then I guess it says something negative about today's internet that I trust some random guy a lot more than I trust Facebook or Google and their hordes of lawyers. If he says he's not collecting my data, I'm inclined to believe him. If Google says they won't misuse my data, I assume that comes with 200 pages of legalese loopholes to let them do whatever they want.

I don't think I'm wrong, either.

I hate that I have to feel agreement with this.

Edit {

Also, for those who are really concerned, I did test going to the landing page and disconnecting from the internet.

It still worked, which leads me to believe the creator was in fact telling the truth.

}

Also, the EU is far from being this "digital warrior" some claim to be.

Grad students working on Deep learning projects need to get data from somewhere.

Putting all those images on a pillory on some marketplaces would certainly raise awareness for privacy.

When they asked for webcam permission I instinctively checked to make sure my webcam was unplugged. Having an algorithm compliment your face is like having a horoscope tell you "You're loyal to fault and you're the kind of person that has tons of friends but you value your closest relationships the most..." etc.

It didn't compliment my face!

I thought the same. I read the TOS, they said it was all local, so I let the page load and then disconnected internet.

It didn't seem to cause any problems.

So? A site like this could still send data when internet is on. Or the code could change at a later date.

Technically. But as a European I'd already be in a lot of trouble for breaking the law, since the website promises to not collect personal data.

What you can do is check the javascript code for any 'http'. So open https://www.hownormalami.eu/main.js and then do CTRL-F and type in 'http'. See if any of the things you find seem to call home. Also scan over the code visually to check for any obfuscated code patterns which could hide additional instances of data transmission. In this case you won't find any shenanigans.

In general I applaud your critical stance.

I was more referring to the fact that it's possible to use it completely offline after the initial load, allowing you to use the app without risking any data leaving your machine.

That being said, I did talk to the author a little bit, and am inclined to trust him.

The Joke is the line that says:

"Read terms: NO - Normal (88%)"

Gave me a chuckle.

We are so used to shitty TOS, cookie banners and all kinds of BS that we learned to just click them away.

I don't click TOS's away not because I am used to them, but because I decided they are not worth my time (based on their length and abundance, how I value my time and what I gain from reading them).

In makes me a bit angry sometimes, you must often confirm you READ it, but it is undoable. They really don't expect you to either, because if they would, they'd be saying their service would really only be used by people reading their entire TOS, which would be too small a crowd to base your business on.

Of course tosdr.org is an interesting alternative and as far as cookie banners are confirmed I truly am finding myself conditioned click them away asap.

> you must often confirm you READ it, but it is undoable

If they actually wanted you to read it, they wouldn't present 50kb of text in a tiny font on a phone screen and give you an 'accept' button at the top (much less give you a 'view' and 'accept' button where the former leads to the 50kb of tiny text and the latter just glosses over the whole affair.)

I did read the TOS, but I have cookies disabled so it still said NO. I suspect that most of the people who do read the TOS probably also have cookies disabled, and therefore also were not counted.

That's very strange. It doesn't use cookies at all. I know because I built it :-)

How unusual. I did follow the link from the TOS to the application.

Would you like me to try again/do anything else to help debug?

Edit: turning on noprocrast because I have work to get done. I'll check back in an hour or so.

That would be great actually. I've enabled debug mode. Add ?debug to the end of the url to get a peak under the engine. So:

https://www.hownormalami.eu/?debug

I went and took another look, it turns out it did work properly, it was just that I read the UI wrong the first time.

Sorry for the false alarm, I should've done better checking first.

Edit: See other comment

Scratch that.

I was able to reproduce the error, it happens when you open the "Terms and Conditions" in a new tab and then click through to the app from there.

Ah, so that's it! Thanks!

Can confirm.

I read the TOS too. I have first party cookies enabled, but I also said no to agreeing to include my data in the dataset. I suspect there's a selection bias of one kind of other in the TOS piece. Probably correlates with other fields too!

Thought the same myself. I am not that old, but still optimistic about the challenge of never uploading an image of myself to the net. I am on pics uploaded by others sadly.

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